All is Forgiven

All is Forgiven

In 2009, Mia Hansen-Løve directed “Father of My Children,” her second feature film. This movie tells the story of a wealthy film producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) who hides his financial ruin from his family then faces total destruction. It is psychological in its study, dramatic without accenting that fact, and there’s no pushiness at all to the way Hansen-Løve approaches it.

This was her first film to have an international release and gained significant attention abroad; but even on repeat viewings it remains strong and affecting. The filmmaking is so assured that one can hardly believe she wrote and directed this when she was only twenty-seven.

Hansen-Løve made her directorial debut with “All is Forgiven” in 2007, which she completed at the age of twenty-five. Until now, this movie had never been released in the United States. Over the past decade or so since “Eden” through “Things to Come” and “Maya,” up until this year’s “Bergman Island” I’ve come to regard Hansen-Løve as one of the most exciting working filmmakers we have today. Here at the very beginning of that journey is where “All Is Forgiven” places us, and it’s thrilling to see her style already fully formed and operational from such an early stage.

Her films cover a wide range of subjects (young love, divorce, suicide, club music), but what connects them all together for Hansen-Løve is time passing by: time as the central theme of cinema itself (Richard Linklater plays around with time explicitly in things like “Boyhood” or any entry within his “Before” trilogy). But there’s something specific about how Mia handles this idea; she looks at time like a novelist would do so.

A novelist can linger over 20 pages describing one day in a family’s life, then jump forward into the next generation on page 21; movies don’t generally work this way. Hansen-Løve does not use flashbacks, her films always move forward, but time gets stretched or compressed: we skip years.

“All is Forgiven” starts in Vienna in 1995 and ends in Paris in 2007 even though it centers around a single family unit consisting of Victor (Paul Blain), his partner Annette (Marie-Christine Friedrich) and their six-year old daughter Pamela (Victoire Rousseau). Victor is French, Annette is Austrian – they have made Austria their home base for reasons only fully understood later on; or rather chosen by Annette since Victor’s approach to life is one of non-choice-making as lifestyle.

Victor has that glinting charismatic quality where when he looks at people he seems so open and curious about them; the expression is almost “come hither” in the classic flirtatious sense. This choice fascinates me although I doubt it’s conscious on his part (though maybe by projecting “come hither” at everybody within reach Victor avoids confronting emptiness inside); such multiple possibilities are Mia’s bread and butter even at twenty-five.

She obsesses over Blain’s face, his responses, his unspoken thoughts – what’s going on with him as an observer from outside everything else happening around him; this come hitherm ness of victor’s being an undercurrent throughout without ever being explained or indeed remarked upon just watching how this guy works world-wise.

Whatever magnetism Victor might have once enjoyed is lost on Annette now, especially when he seems so determined to avoid doing anything with his life. He spends the whole day sitting around. He talks vaguely about “writing.” He does drugs. He’s a compulsive underachiever. Frustrated, Annette asks, “Why do you want everyone to think you’re a loser?” When the family returns to Paris, Victor’s drug use worsens. He becomes violent with Annette. Pamela sees it all. Finally Annette kicks him out and he goes to live with another junkie.

Victor tells his sister Martine (Carole Franck) about his anxiety and malaise, but with that tiny spark of charisma still in his eyes. Is he anxious for real? Or is he just lazy? Are addicts just like this? Does he love Annette and Pamela or not? In a 2016 interview with Indiewire, Hansen-Løve said, “For me, making films is about questions, not about the answers. I guess that if I would have the answers, I wouldn’t have to write the film at all.”

The second half begins with an alarming title card: “11 Years Later.” (The other title cards are more manageable: “Back in Paris,” “One Month Later,” etc.) With no warning no characters suddenly start talking about how long it’s been since something else happened; there isn’t even a cut to black before we see what happens next All Is Forgiven leaps forward over a decade.

Victor and Annette aren’t together anymore; she has remarried and Pamela (now played by Constance Rousseau , Victoire’s actual older sister) is a college student with only hazy memories of her father. Martine whom Pamela doesn’t remember at all reaches out to her daughter’s stepfather hoping to engineer a reunion between him and Victor. Victor is in Paris; he’s not “sick” like he used to be. He wants a relationship with his daughter.

Like with her later films, particularly the 20-year time-frame of Eden, Hansen-Løve is interested in time here, but disinterested in showing the effect of its passing whether through old-age makeup or even just slight changes to characters’ appearances. Annette looks harder than she did in the first half; nothing has been done to “age” her. Victor looks exactly the same. Pamela is played by a different actress now.

This creates an eerie sense that Victor and Annette are trapped in time, stuck where they were while Pamela moves forward (or away from them), still transforming. And maybe also there’s something happening here about how much all of our lives would make sense if we could only see each other as different people, all the time?

With anyone who has known and loved a drug addict, the Victor-Pamela reunion is likely to be familiar, but “All is Forgiven” surprises in its minute by minute experience of it. Often Hansen-Løve will include scenes left out by other directors, scenes of people walking from one place to another, those in between moments that are normally excised from a film because we don’t need to know every step a person takes to get from A to B. But Hansen-Løve is interested in the in-between, the spaces between things, people, locations, dialogue.

So here there’s this long scene of Pamela walking back to her grandparents’ house fields, hills, woods Pamela getting from one location to another. Life is lived in the moment in between too. Look for these scenes in Hansen-Løve’s films; they are everywhere. Her style is very patient; she doesn’t rush us along to the next thing. Which is perhaps part of why “All is Forgiven,” a simpler story than say “Eden” or “Things to Come,” has such resonance it’s one of those rare films where the title means something.

What makes Hansen-Løve’s work so appealing? I don’t know if it hits everyone quite like this but for me it evokes what John Keats called “negative capability,” which he said was something extremely rare even then (1817) and means when “man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” It’s often said that our world right now can feel especially polarized.

Yes. But every era has its polarizations and human beings I think just have a taste for stark binaries maybe? But what happens in between all those “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” all those walks home or walks to work or walks through a park with your father you’ve never known that’s where everything good is. That’s where art is. To know this at the age of 25, as Hansen-Løve clearly did, is quite something.

Watch All is Forgiven For Free On Gomovies.